Rebellious Cooks and Recipe Writing in Communist Bulgaria

Shkodrova's monograph explores how women in communist Bulgaria exchanged recipes to build private collections, challenging the communist ideology of home cooking as household slavery. These collections held various meanings, including navigating the economy, fostering friendships, and cultivating individual identity in a collective society.

Format: Hardback
Length: 200 pages
Publication date: 11 February 2021
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

People in the Soviet Union during the Cold War period faced a challenging and restrictive environment, with limited access to information, resources, and personal freedoms. Despite these challenges, people found ways to exist and resist in their daily lives. One way that people resisted was through the exchange of recipes. Shkodrova's monograph, "Recipes and Resistance in Communist Bulgaria," explores how women in communist Bulgaria passionately exchanged recipes with friends and strangers, building substantial and impressive private collections of recipes. This activity was considered borderline contraband, as it went against the general disapproval of home cooking that formed part of the ideology of communism. Home cooking was seen as household slavery and an agent of patriarchalism. However, private recipe collections were by far the preferred written source of culinary information, more popular than the state-approved commercial cookbooks. Shkodrova shows how these recipe collections held many different meanings for the women who collected them. They helped to navigate the communist economy, enabling new friendships to be developed while engaging safely in power relations, and cultivating a sense of individual identity in a society where collective existence was prioritized and exalted. Drawing on primary sources including scrapbook cookbooks and working from the establishment of cookery classes before communism and their obliteration thereafter, Shkodrova presents a structured outline of the meanings of recipes exchange and home cooking for Bulgarian women under communism.

Weight: 327g
Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781350132306